Monday, February 27, 2012

google chrome in pclos

OK, to start out, I'm running PCLinuxOS fully updated from the 2010.07 installation I did about a year and a half ago, so I think that technically I'm at the current PCLOS 2012.02.

Synaptic in PCLOS has the Chromium web browser, which I've been happily using, but since it seems to have fallen a bit behind -- as shown in Chromium's "About" window, at version 16.0.912.63 (Developer Build 113337 Linux) -- I decided to try installing google-chrome-beta.

Here's one of the things that bugs me about the PCLOS forums: In every forum thread I found where a user asked how to install Google Chrome, most of the replies went on about how installing from "outside sources" is "not advised," blah, blah. Very little in the way of helping a person who wants to do it anyway. The developer, Texstar, to his credit, did mention that the lsb package would need to be installed via Synaptic, and one other poster provided the command which I ended up using (see below).

If you dig around a little bit, you can find the beta channels for Google Chrome (see http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel). I downloaded google-chrome-beta_current_i386.rpm, which is listed as the one for "32-bit Fedora/OpenSUSE." The download went into my ~/Downloads directory.

First, I went to Synaptic and installed lsb, which brought in the following packages:

Next, I ran su to get get root access, then cd'd into the Downloads directory and ran the following command:

# rpm -Uvh google-chrome-beta_current_i386.rpm

This worked, and I now have Google Chrome 18.0.1025.39 beta running in PCLOS. I didn't bother going back to the PCLOS forums and posting this information, as I'm sure the forum regulars there would rip me a new one. But for anyone who is willing to run the risk of installing Google Chrome in PCLOS from "outside sources," this worked for me.

Sometimes I really hate being told that doing something "is not advised."

In my March 26 entry "updating chrome in pclos," I mentioned that I'm unable to get upgrades for Google Chrome in this distro. This is still the case; about once a month I've been going to the Google Chrome beta download page as noted and downloading an upgraded version, then running the rpm command that I mentioned. Maybe you'll have better luck getting Chrome upgrades via Synaptic.